Damages due to Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

What  is less known about the decision of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is it awarded damages to Speaker Gloria Arroyo.

In its opinion released Oct. 2, the WGAD recommends that Arroyo, who is facing plunder charges, be accorded “with an enforceable right to compensation” for having been deprived of her liberty.

This was disclosed by international lawyer Amal Alamuddin Clooney in an email to Larry Gadon, one of Arroyo’s Philippine lawyers, who sent me an email of the decision.

The case of the former Philippine president received worldwide attention when Amal Alammudin (now Clooney) took up her case and filed it in February 2015. At the time of her arrest she was suffering from “multilevel cervical spondylosis” or the wearing of the bones.

“Mrs Arroyo and her legal team welcome the UN’s expert opinion and urge the Philippine Government to comply with it immediately,” Clooney said in the email.

The Aquino government failed to prove their allegations. The UN opinion “finds that the detention of former President Arroyo was arbitrary and illegal under international law because the Sandiganbayan court failed to take into account her individual circumstances when it repeatedly denied bail, failed to consider measures alternative to pre-trial detention and because of the undue delays in proceedings against her.”

“Further, the Working Group recognized that the charges against Mrs Arroyo are politically motivated, since she is detained ‘as a result of the exercise of her right to take part in government and the conduct of public affairs’ and ‘because of her political… opinion.’”

The story of Arroyo’s arbitrary detention is back in the limelight because she has been cleared of the last accusation made against her. The case was for electoral sabotage in 2007 made by former Maguindanao provincial administrator Norie Unas.

The key word in damages awarded to Ms Arroyo for compensation is an enforceable right because “the deprivation of liberty has already occurred.” Legal experts will have to quantify the damages as far as the financial aspect is concerned

At press time yesterday I wanted to verify if her lawyers had in fact followed up the damages issue.

I will not go into the long story of how Amal Clooney took up Speaker Arroyo’s case. She was able to meet Arroyo personally at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC) through this column in December 2013.

“There’s not much to do after this opinion,” Gadon said. He added that the UN working group’s opinion is “strong enough” by itself.

Amal Clooney has another case which included the issue of rehabilitation after the imprisonment of Yuli Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine. She wanted to rehabilitate her political image after she won her case. Amal would bring her only daughter to the court hearings of her mother.

As far as her political enemies were concerned her political career was finished. Although a woman she was a political fighter with ideas of her own on what was good for her country. Right or wrong, the issue became whether she could rehabilitate the image made of her by her enemies. This column is a compilation of many articles on both her person and her politics through the years that led to her imprisonment. It is a story of a woman who went into politics generally reserved for men.

The comparison between Tymoshenko  and Arroyo ends there. Arroyo has become Speaker of the House of Representatives in the Philippines not long after her imprisonment which Amal was able to prove as politically motivated.

There is also a feminist angle to the Tymoshenko case because she was the first woman to be appointed Prime Minister. She began her career in politics in Ukraine when she co-led the Orange Revolution. She served from Jan. 24 to Sept. 8, 2005, and again from Dec. 18, 2007 to March 4, 2010.

Tymoshenko is the leader of the All-Ukrainian Union “Fatherland” political party that has 19 seats in parliament. She is its parliamentary faction leader when her party won 101 seats in the parliamentary election of 2012.

After the 2010 presidential election, a number of criminal cases were brought against her. On Oct. 11, 2011 she was convicted of embezzlement and abuse of power, and sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay the state $188 million. The prosecution and conviction were viewed by many governments – most prominently the European Union, who repeatedly called for the release of Tymoshenko as the primary condition for signing the EU Association Agreement, the US, and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

She was released on Feb. 22, 2014, in the concluding days of the Euromaidan revolution, following a revision of the Ukrainian criminal code that effectively decriminalized the actions for which she was imprisoned.

The decision was supported by 322 votes. She was officially rehabilitated on Feb. 28, 2014  after the Euromaidan revolution, the Ukrainian Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights closed the case and found that “no crime was committed.”

Before becoming Ukraine’s first female Prime Minister in 2005, Tymoshenko co-led the Orange Revolution. She was placed third in Forbes magazine’s List of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women 2005.

Under her guidance, Ukraine’s revenue collections from the electricity industry grew by several thousand percent. She scrapped the practice of barter in the electricity market, requiring industrial customers to pay for their electricity in cash. She also terminated exemptions for many organizations which excluded them from having their power disconnected. Her reforms meant that the government had sufficient funds to pay civil servants and increase salaries.

In 2000, Tymoshenko’s government provided an additional 18 billion Hryvna for social payments. Half of this amount was collected due to withdrawal of funds from shadow schemes, the ban on barter payments and the introduction of competition rules to the energy market.